Artist/ Translator of the Human Condition

Artists incorporate the human feelings into their art work. 


 Whether it is joy, sorrow, sadness, horror or our own inhumanity towards each other, the artist is a sensitive who takes in the myriad of feelings, images, sounds and sensations that have no words to explain them.  Then we interpret them into paintings, sculpture, poems, songs and plays.  In this way we help explain the human condition so others can make sense of their world and emotions.  There is great beauty in this world, there is great sadness, and there is inexplicable horror and violence. It is the stuff life is made of.   It is what took Picasso into his Blue Period(click) and why he created the masterpiece Guernica. 


Sadness, Anguish, Grief

Loss, Death, Pain

Michelangelo's Pieta from google image

Pain, Horror, Madness

Munch's  The Scream from google image

 Michelangelo's Pieta captures a tender sadness of a Mother's loss of her son, Munch's Scream incapsulates the absolute feeling of horror, pain and terror, and Hiroshige's Wave shows the power of nature over man.

Violence/Death/Mans Inhumanity to Man

Detail from Picasso's Guernica  from google image

I thought we would touch on these themes and look at how artists capture these themes for us.


These past two weeks I have been in New Orleans, as you might have noted in my previous posts.  I am here to help my partner with her Father who is dying of  cancer that moved into the bones.  He is in the last stages of cancer and the decline has been rather rapid.  It is so difficult to see someone you love so ill and watch their body begin its final transition.  Seeing  the emotions of friends and family grapple with their emotions and watching him cope with pain and  sadness is so wrenching.  It brought to mind master art work that best depict such sadness and pain.  
Also in the time I have been here in New Orleans there has been an unprecedented rash of senseless violence and murders in a city mired in poverty and recovery from the disaster of Hurricane Katrina.  Again as I was horrified by the senselessness of the murder of the young and impoverished.  One such murder was that of a 5 year old girl at a birthday party and a 33 year old Mother of 3 driving three blocks away.  Boys playing men shooting at each other over rivalries in broad day light.  A city in turmoil with senseless murders and violence. 
It is not only New Orleans, but much of the United States and other countries are resorting to solving problems with guns and force. 
The world seems more violent these days and violence more senseless.  More Mothers grieve the loss of their children than should.  Boys that can never become men, and little girls that will never see their first dance.  How do we cope with such loss, sadness, pain, and terror.  Lets take a closer look at artists who have done so.

Blue Madonna/A Portrait of Motherhood

BLUE MADONNA/A PORTRAIT OF MOTHERHOOD

Why do we do art, what motivates us as artists to do what we do? Joy, love, anger, pain, sadness...emotions and shared human experiences are certainly one of the things that motivate all artists.

An artist is like a sponge that absorbs experiences around himself/herself and then expresses them back to others using color, shape, texture, line and space. Dance, drama, music, poetry, and visual arts can elicit feelings that are difficult to express in any other way. Complex feeling can be expressed through art...think of the aria in the movie Philadelphia when Andy knows he is dying and has no other way to express the sheer pain of leaving life and loved ones, other than to play his favorite opera La Mamma Morta, at full volume, sung at by Maria Callas until it encompasses his whole being. Or think of the play a Street Car Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, when Stanley cries out Stella in a soul riveting pleading sob. Contemplate the ballet Swan Lake, its tender tragedy and love story. These are the ways artists interpret and give back our inexpressible emotions to us.

Aging of our parents and loved ones is not easy to look at and experience. It is a journey we all go on, unless a parent dies young. There are moments of joy, tenderness, and sadness on this journey. Everyday I go into my Mother's nursing home, into the alzheimer/dementia unit I am bombarded by sights, sounds and smells. I come away with feelings and emotions I do not know what to do with. The nursing home can be a drama of emotions on any given day. Adult children visiting alzheimer parents who no longer recognize them, patients who are robbed of their memory by dementia, the frustration of nurses trying to be patient when a patient screams and screams caught in a moment of confusion of where they are...sometimes it is no more that a tear sliding down a cheek or a head bent lost in a world of boredom...it is a bombardment of images and impressions. The smells of medicine, food, urine and antiseptics and the sounds of old movies droning away in the background effect other senses. One cannot walk away without feeling something and for an artist it is a hundred times so. Sometimes I think of Picasso's "Guernica" or Munch's "Scream" and then I think of Leonardo Da Vinci's pictures of aging or Renaissance pictures of Motherhood and religious icons.

I love this picture of my Mother, it is sad, it is tender, it is vulnerable. Mother is almost 99 now and at times aware and at other times not. She still knows me and my brother, she can still express her unconditional love she has always had for us. I have looked at this photo many times and felt a myriad of emotions. I have been reluctant to write and share because it is so close and personal to me. But like art ideas that come over and over to me, telling me they need to come in to creation, this one calls to me. It won't go away, I keep going back to this picture and thinking about it. Something about it seemed universal, beyond just an ordinary moment in the nursing home with Mom, it transcends the everyday to a shared human experience...it is persistent in my mind. What is it that I am being called to create, to express? Then I realized that the photo of my Mother wrapped in a blue blanket reminded me of Renaissance paintings I had seen before in art history studies and at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida that has a large collection of Renaissance paintings. The photograph of my Mother takes on an iconic form to me, the Jungian idea Motherhood as an archetype, as a perfection of love and sacrifice-for my Mother truly embodied those qualities.if

I know I will do an art work from this photo, from these experiences..but it has not yet completely formed in my mind as to how. But it keeps calling me, and I cannot ignore the call for long. I have thought about would my Mother mind me using pictures that show her in a vulnerable state, and I know in my heart she would not. She would tell me to reach out to others, help in anyway you can, touch others lives, give to others...that is the kind of person she is. So when I do this artwork it will be with her in mind, and with her guidance and love.

The Scream by Munch in Carrots

This site will take you to Munch in Carrots.

Remember it is clickable in righthand column under webstites of interest.

http://www.oddee.com/item_96575.aspx

What a halloween stew this would make!!!